


Poison Roots, Healing Touch

by newtypeshadow



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, But with the Force, Fairy Tale Retellings, Force-Sensitive Finn (Star Wars), Force-Sensitive Rey, M/M, Pre-Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Spells & Enchantments, The Force, True Love's Kiss, and consent is sexy, because kissing someone who's asleep without prior permission is creepy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-11
Updated: 2020-04-11
Packaged: 2021-03-01 19:00:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,575
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23601949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/newtypeshadow/pseuds/newtypeshadow
Summary: When the dragon they’re escaping on is shot down, Finn and Poe are separated. Both mournfully assume their companion is dead.What follows is aStar Wars: The Force Awakensretelling of Snow White.
Relationships: Finn & Rey (Star Wars), Poe Dameron/Finn
Comments: 10
Kudos: 50





	Poison Roots, Healing Touch

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this before _Star Wars: The Last Jedi_ came out, so this is more a fanfic for _Star Wars: The Force Awakens_ than the entire sequel trilogy.

Finn doesn’t know he’s been poisoned at first. He only realizes it after Poe is flung from the dragon they used to escape the evil king’s castle, and Finn wakes on the beach with an arrow in his back and sees the sickly white vines curling like roots around his sides. The dragon was shot much more; the white veins bulge along its back, throttle its bloodless neck.

He can’t find Poe anywhere on the riverside or deeper in the forest. He prays the enemy spy hasn’t drowned—that he didn’t save the beautiful man from King Kylo only to deliver him to a swifter death.

Either way, Finn thinks, he has done Poe a kindness. Finn only wishes they’d been able to make it, together, to the exiled Queen Leia’s stronghold. In their short time together, planning and making their escape from the castle, Finn had grown closer to Poe than he had to any of the soldiers and knights he grew with, trained with. He had hoped he could remain with Poe in some capacity after they reached the Queen’s Resistance. Now, the thought of trying to find them without Poe, the thought of fighting without Poe, makes Finn feel hollow inside, like a gourd scraped out by a spoon.

Finn doesn’t know how much time the poison in his back has left him, but he fled the castle because he didn’t want to die—neither himself nor Poe—and he doesn’t want to die now that he’s free of the tyrant king. He cleans the wound as best he can, then follows the river, knowing eventually he will find civilization.

What he finds, late in the afternoon, is a cabin. No one answers when he knocks, so Finn walks in. It is austere but well-used. Finn sits gingerly, mindful of the arrow, and has a mind to wait for the owner to return and beg for lodging, perhaps in exchange for work—but then the low ache in his back slices into him in the pattern of the white veining, and he opens his mouth in a scream he’s unconscious before he can voice.

* * *

Rey likes the stranger, she decides after she startles him out of the chair and nearly kills him. He has a spark about him—like she does, and Master Luke. This alone would not have stopped her, however. Instead, it’s his injury, the fletching on the arrow sticking out of his back, that makes her withdraw her staff and mark him as, if not friend, then not enemy.

She presses him to lie on his stomach so she can tend to him.

The arrow is fletched with the red and black of the Knights of Ren, the tyrant king’s personal guard. Any enemy of King Kylo’s is no enemy of Rey’s, that’s for certain.

When the stranger wakes up the next morning they introduce themselves. Rey gives Finn a foraged breakfast, and Finn tells her of his escape. He mourns for Poe, his friend who is lost; Rey mourns for Master Luke, her mentor who is lost. Finn doesn’t try to give her hope, and Rey smiles in thanks.

Rey has a salve that she thinks can heal Finn—the injury, and the poison—but it will take weeks to make enough to fully cure him, and the preparation will take all of her time—time she needs to find and fix and eat food, make potions to sell at the market, and protect her cabin from encroaching beasts. And so they trade: she shows Finn how to do her daily chores, and he does them so she can work on his cure. Finn learns quickly, excels quickly, and makes good company when Rey returns from foraging for bacta root. She gives him small doses of each daily concoction—enough to stave off the worst of the poison’s spread. Bacta root works best when applied in one large treatment, however, so she saves most of the new salve for the final application.

In the meantime, she asks Finn about life in the castle, about a boy named Ben who Master Luke used to train, whether he ever met the exiled queen, and how he came to be employed by an evil tyrant.

She tells Finn about growing up in the woods, about the strangeness of Master Luke, who taught her the healing arts she practices now, and about the spark she felt in Finn that is slowly being smothered by the spreading poison. She tells him if he’s quiet, if he reaches out with his mind, the world reaches back—and if you’re careful, if you will it, the world will bend for you as you like.

She hands him a glass of water without using her hands, and he marvels. When she feels the press of unsure fingers reach for her through her spark, she meets them, and Finn smiles with delight that matches hers.

When Finn won’t wake up the third week, and the spidery white veins have crossed to his heart, Rey pulls him into the bacta suit she’s built for him and prays it can still save her friend.

* * *

Poe wakes in shallow water. Finn is gone. The dragon is nowhere in sight. He searches, but there is nowhere to cross the river to search the other side, and the sky is getting dark. He naps in a tree, then finds the stars and the moon, plots his course to the Queen’s Resistance, sleeps again, and sets out at first light.

His news for the Queen cannot wait. He’s been gone too long already.

It is a few days’ journey, and he mourns Finn more than perhaps their short friendship should allow, but when he arrives at the hidden forest fortress he is able to smile for the people he has, and the Queen whom he serves.

Poe draws the slice of map he was given and then swallowed upon capture. He draws precisely and to scale, his aerial recreation perfect as only a dragonrider’s can be. The triangle of map slides into the map in the Queen’s possession, and she smiles with her eyes for the first time Poe has seen since she left her own palace in exile, her husband dead by the hand of her son.

They can now find her brother, the wizard Luke, and take back the castle and the kingdom.

And free soldiers like Finn, Poe thinks to himself, still devastated by the knowledge that Finn was ripped from his family and trained to fight for the evil King Snoke, who arranged the coup that unseated Queen Leia with Prince Ben’s help—before Kylo took his life and the throne.

The map leads them to a small cabin in the woods. Defending it is a young woman with fiery eyes that turn to mush when Queen Leia’s dog bounds up in excited recognition. The girl drops the staff and herself to meet the dog’s excited kisses. When she looks up again, she is smiling at the queen.

Poe steps up with the queen, just in case the woman plans to reclaim her staff—she looks like she knows how to use it.

But the queen knows the woman’s name, and when the woman hears Poe’s, her eyes widen.

“Finn’s friend Poe?” she asks.

Poe’s breath catches. “You know Finn? Where is he? Is he alive?”

Rey grabs Poe’s wrist and drags him into the cabin.

Finn is on a makeshift bed on a kitchen table, wrapped in a white suit of bandages, telltale white veins gripping his still cheeks. Poe takes that face in gentle, trembling hands, but Finn gives no reaction. He asks Rey if Finn will be all right.

When Rey says she isn’t sure, but there’s a way Poe can help, Poe tells her: “Anything. I’ll do it.” Finn is Poe’s friend and Poe loves him. Finn shouldn’t die for saving Poe’s life.

Rey warns Poe before she touches his mind. He flinches—he has felt a touch like this, King Kylo’s oil-slick pawing at his mind and his memory and his sanity, and the echo of that touch frightens him down to his bones. But he makes himself stay still. He looks at Finn’s slack face and strokes a brown cheek with his tanned thumb, and realizes Rey’s touch on his mind is far more gentle than her hand on his wrist had been, more a hold than a probe.

Then Poe feels a third presence touching his mind, one that makes him feel whole and happy, like he’s flying—a familiar presence he wants to hold and not let go of ever again. It’s Finn’s mind he’s feeling, and Rey’s retreats, and Poe would reach out to Finn’s mind if he knew how. But Finn’s presence moves for him, recognizes him, enfolds him for a moment—and Finn’s eyes flutter open.

When his gaze finds Poe, he smiles. It is beautiful, blinding and wide, and Poe’s knees wobble.

“Poe,” Finn says, voice throaty with disuse.

The spidery veins along Finn’s cheeks wither and die and fade to nothing under Poe’s relieved gaze.

Finn is really here, alive and in front of him. He’s all right.

Poe can’t stop smiling, moves a hand to Finn’s chest to feel it rise and fall, comfortingly alive. “Welcome back, buddy,” he says around the lump in his throat. “You had me worried—I thought I’d lost you.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed the fic, please let me know via kudos and comments—they always make my day! ^_^


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